Download or read book An Open Letter to Samuel Colgate written by DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Man Who Hated Women written by Amy Sohn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 • "Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery. Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.
Download or read book D M Bennett the Truth Seeker written by Roderick Bradford and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett (1818-1882) was nineteenth-century America''s most controversial publisher and free-speech martyr. Bennett founded the "blasphemous" New York periodical The Truth Seeker in 1873, and his publications were censored and prohibited from newsstands long before the expression "banned in Boston" was heard. In less than a decade, the former Shaker and self-described Thomas Paine infidel became the most successful publisher of freethought literature in America - perhaps the world. Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, and Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Great Agnostic," were only a few of the illustrious freethinkers who subscribed to the periodical devoted to "science, morals, freethought and human happiness." But Bennett''s opposition to dogmatic religion and puritanical obscenity laws so infuriated Anthony Comstock, the U.S. Post Office''s "special agent" and self-proclaimed "weeder in God''s garden," that the freethinking publisher was eventually prosecuted, subjected to a controversial and widely publicized trial, and finally imprisoned.Based on original sources and extensively researched, this in-depth yet accessible biography of D.M. Bennett offers a fascinating glimpse into the turbulent period of late nineteenth-century America-the Gilded Age, a time when our nation was controlled by pious politicians, powerful manufacturers, and censorious clergymen. Roderick Bradford follows Bennett''s evolution from a devout Shaker to an unremitting skeptic and America''s most iconoclastic publisher. He details the circumstances that led to Bennett''s historically significant New York obscenity trial and the monumental, though ultimately unsuccessful, petition campaign for a pardon. This was the largest protest of its kind in the nineteenthcentury and one that went all the way to the White House. Bradford also investigates Bennett''s prominent role in the National Liberal League, his interactions with leading suffragists and the National Defense Association (a forerunner of the ACLU), and his flirtation with spiritualism and theosophy.Roderick Bradford has written a valuable historical contribution, a long-overdue tribute to a free-speech champion, and a colorful depiction of memorable characters and events during a period of great change in American history.
Download or read book Devices and Desires written by Andrea Tone and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From thriving black market to big business, the commercialization of birth control in the United States In Devices and Desires, Andrea Tone breaks new ground by showing what it was really like to buy, produce, and use contraceptives during a century of profound social and technological change. A down-and-out sausage-casing worker by day who turned surplus animal intestines into a million-dollar condom enterprise at night; inventors who fashioned cervical caps out of watch springs; and a mother of six who kissed photographs of the inventor of the Pill -- these are just a few of the individuals who make up this riveting story.
Download or read book Obscenity Rules written by Whitney Strub and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some, he was “America’s leading smut king,” hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Roth for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law—and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity’s meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced Roth v. United States, placing the trial in the context of its times—the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates—by using Roth’s own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices. The significance of Roth, as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion—which on the one hand reflected the liberalizing attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept “obscene” expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan’s written words necessarily acknowledged. In our era of internet pornography and Fifty Shades of Grey, it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of Roth and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.
Download or read book A Truth Seeker in Europe written by De Robigne Mortimer Bennett and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pamphlets written by Benjamin Franklin Underwood and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lust on Trial written by Amy Werbel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.
Download or read book The Truth Seeker Collection of forms hymns and recitations written by and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder written by Robert Corn-Revere and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the nineteenth century with Anthony Comstock, America's 'censor in chief,' The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder explores how censors operate and why they wore out their welcome in society at large. This book explains how the same tactics were tried and eventually failed in the twentieth century, with efforts to censor music, comic books, television, and other forms of popular entertainment. The historic examples illustrate not just the mindset and tactics of censors, but why they are the ultimate counterculture warriors and why, in free societies, censors never occupy the moral high ground. This book is for anyone who wants to know more about why freedom of speech is important and how protections for free expression became part of the American identity.
Download or read book The New England Watch and Ward Society written by Paul Charles Kemeny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of American Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By suppressing obscene literature, gambling, and prostitution, the moral reform organization embodied Protestant efforts to shape public morality in an increasing intellectually and culturally diverse society.
Download or read book Trial Of D M Bennett written by De Robigne M. Bennett and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1973 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Anthony Comstock written by Heywood Broun and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Anthony Comstock written by Richard Christian Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sale written by American Art Association, Anderson Galleries (Firm) and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 1154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Democracy in the Making written by Arthur S. Meyers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1908, a remarkable direction in community learning began in Boston and spread across the country, becoming the Open Forum lecture movement. These locally planned, trans-denominational lectures, followed by periods for questions, were characterized as "the striking of mind upon mind." This study recovers the movement and shows what can be applied to our time. George W. Coleman brought a deep commitment to free speech in developing the Forum and Mary Caroline Crawford was essential in implementing it. Understanding this initiative broadens our awareness of personal and community courage and democratic planning. We can regain this informed, reflective, respectful approach, and achieve an America "to be"--a democracy in the making.
